My father had a theory about the long school hours. He said they were calculated to give single moms time to fuck their boyfriends after work. He said this was not all bad.
Children’s Paradise straddled some prime west-side real estate. A dirt yard jammed with play equipment faced Wilshire Boulevard. The yard was three times the size of the main classroom building. A swimming pool was positioned at the west flank.
I daydreamed my way through the third and fourth grades there. My reading skills eclipsed my retarded comprehension of arithmetic. I was a big kid. I flaunted my size and bluffed my way through minor kid confrontations. It was the genesis of my efficacious “Crazy Man Act.”
I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.
My Crazy Man Act got me the attention that I craved and warned aggressors not to fuck with me. I laughed when nothing was funny, picked my nose and ate my snot, and drew swastikas all over my school notebooks. I was the poster boy for the If-You-Can’t-Love-Me-Notice-Me chapter in all child psychology textbooks.
My mother was drinking more. She’d crank highballs at night and get pissed off, maudlin or effusive. I found her in bed with men a couple of times. The guys had that ’50s lounge-lizard look. They probably sold used cars or repossessed them.
I told my father about the men. He said he had private eyes tailing my mother. I started scanning my blind side everywhere I went with her.
My mother quit Packard-Bell and hired on at Airtek Dynamics. My father worked drugstore jobs free-lance. I continued my education at Children’s Paradise. My Crazy Man Act kept me tenuously afloat.
My parents were unable to talk in a civil fashion. They did not exchange words under any circumstances. Their expressions of hatred were reserved for me:
’57 faded out. My mother and I flew to Wisconsin for Christmas. Uncle Ed Wagner sold her a spiffy red-and- white Buick. We drove it home the first week of ’58. We settled back into our work and school routine.
My mother sat me down late in January and cozied me up for a big lie. She said we needed a change of scenery. I was almost ten years old, and I’d never lived in a house. She said she knew a nice place called El Monte.
My mother lied poorly. She tended to formalize and overstate her lies and often embellished them with expressions of parental concern. She always laid out her major lies half-drunk.
I was a good lie decoder. My mother did not credit me with this gift.
I told my father about the move. He found the notion dubious. He said El Monte was full of wetbacks. It was a skunk place by any and all standards. He figured my mother was ditching some West L.A. stud—or was running to some El Monte shitbird. You don’t uproot and move 30-odd miles for no goddamn reason.
He told me to stay alert. He told me to report my mother’s round-heeled stunts.
My mother wanted to show off El Monte. We cruised out there on a Sunday afternoon.
My father got me predisposed to hate and fear the place. He’d portrayed it accurately.
El Monte was a smoggy void. People parked on their lawns and hosed down their cars in their underwear. The sky was carcinogenic tan. I noticed lots of evil-looking pachucos.
We went by our new house. It was pretty on the outside— but smaller than our pad in Santa Monica.
We talked to our new landlady, Anna May Krycki. She was nervous and chatty and darty-eyed. She let me pet her Airedale dog.
A yard enclosed the Kryckis’ house and our house. My mother said we could get a dog of our own. I told her I wanted a beagle. She said she’d get me one for my birthday.
We met Mr. Krycki and Mrs. Krycki’s son from a previous marriage. We walked through our new house.
My room was half the size of my room in Santa Monica. The kitchen was no more than a crawl space. The bathroom was narrow and cramped.
The house justified the move. It cosmetically vouched my mother’s Big Lie.
I knew it at the time.
We moved out early in February. I enrolled at Anne LeGore Elementary School and became my father’s full-time spy.
My mother was drinking more. The kitchen smelled like her Early Times bourbon and L&M cigarettes. I sniffed the tumblers she left in the sink—to see what the allure was. The syrupy odor made me gag.
She didn’t bring men home. My father figured she was shacking up on the weekends. He started calling El Monte “Shitsville, U.S.A.”
I made the best of a bad place.
I went to school. I got friendly with two Mexican kids named Reyes and Danny. They shared a reefer with me once. I got dizzy and goofy ecstatic and went home and ate a whole box of cookies. I passed out and woke up convinced that I would soon become a heroin addict.
School was a drag. My arithmetic skills were subzero and my social skills were subpoor. Reyes and Danny were my only pals.
My father visited me at noon recess one day—a divorce decree violation. A kid shoved me for no reason. I kicked his ass in full view of my father.
My father was proud of me. The kid snitched me off to Mr. Tubiolo, the vice-principal. Tubiolo called my mother and suggested a conference.
They met and talked. They went out on a couple of dates. I reported the details to my father.
My mother got me a beagle puppy for my tenth birthday. I named her “Minna” and smothered her with
